Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School careless errors, rushing etc. Help

Seems like almost a truism to have a creative big picture thinker who rushes through and makes mistakes with details. I wouldn't necessarily count on it changing dramatically as a develomental thing. "I'm sorry Albert, this whole E and M and C thing is meaningless, because once again you've forgotten to tie your shoes."

There can be many different reasons behind rushing like trying to get any meaning out of the activity to make it at least somewhat intellectually challenging. Or to avoid the highly-attentive anxiety laden perfectionist inner voice waiting for you to obsess even a tiny bit about completeness or accuracy. Completing 90% of the questions in 5 minutes is better than staring and obsessing over the first question for 30 minutes. And then there can be an added challenge when vision problems make it easy to miss details.

That's all from personal experience (duh, not the Albert part.) But maybe it is developmental

I was also wondering about this . When DS comes home with some tests from the previous week or when he's at home working on few things . He makes what i would call a silly mistake , because he knew well what the answer should be . In fact he's giving all the right answer when we went through some of those papers from school , and i kept wondering why .. why did you do this kind of mistake ? You understood the question , you knew the answer right , but why did you give the wrong answer ? He rushes when he's working on some tests at school , i have to keep reminding him to re-check his work during test . His answer " i think re-checking is a waste of time , mom " *sigh*

with my kid (5), i've come to the conclusion that when she feels like she understands the concept she feels infallible on the specific answer. hence, the non-attentiveness and the non-checking...

I just wonder where the line is between, "creative-big picture-conceptual" orientation and red flags for attention issues. She can be highly accurate, and is very FAST. She has a hard time slowing down and caring about the pages and pages she is handed a day. She gets grade level work, so called extra work, above grade level work and then her enrichment work. I might start tuning out too. I wouldn't even be on here asking if her nitpicky teacher didn't bring this up along with her other major sin of using upper case letters randomly in a sentence from time to time. There are days those things get on my nerves too, and other days when I step back and see how annoying it is that we are focusing on letter formation when her stories are rich and highly developed. There is always the worry about attention issues since she is so intense, talkative, with wild flights of imagination, absentmindedness, and tireless energy etc. (I just realized I just described myself).

i guess maybe the litmus test is... is the attention stuff truly debilitating for her? if yes, then she might benefit from some new strategies - but if it's not (and just the picky teacher!) then you might be golden.

you might also possibly try getting the teacher to pare down the repetitions (and ramp up new work?) to see if that helps the accuracy. my kid's repetitive work goes (comically) downhill once she feels like she's "got it"...

These things are not remotely debilitating for her, and as I said, at grade level, she makes almost no errors, and the errors she makes above grade level (math, not in reading, where she is fairly flawless), are not because she doesn't understand the material. The order of her work is grade level math, then extra math (not sure the level here) then above grade level math, then enrichment folder. The other kids do grade level math and that is it. I think at the point she gets to her extra work, she wants to make paper airplanes out of all those worksheets and I don't blame her. Her teacher says she completes her work and extra work before the others even do their grade level work, but then the teacher sits me down and makes a big deal out of her skipping problems or making a careless error although she acknowledges that she knows the material. Perhaps they haven't considered that at some point it isn't about more work but more appropriate work. Her grade was lower than expected due to careless errors and not asking for more work even though she tested at 100% on end of year tests the first week of school. I know some kids are math fanatics and would want more work after that, but come on, I don't think her grade should be dependent on those things.

I think that falls squarely under the problem is with the school not the child.

An anecdote: my DD had to do grade-level review for the past, ugh, I don't know how many weeks in prep for state testing. I was seeing more errors than usual and started wondering after a while--man, has she forgotten these skills a bit? Testing is over now and she is doing accelerated work again. Her math work is now flawless.